Suitability of container-oriented abstractions for WebAssembly orchestration

Determine whether the abstractions and separation of concerns used successfully by Docker and containerd are appropriate for WebAssembly runtimes, including whether request handling should be delegated to processes running within a container or provided directly by the runtime.

Background

The paper explains that existing runC-compatible WebAssembly shims for lifecycle and resource management are still in incubation and are intended to integrate WebAssembly into existing container ecosystems. It therefore identifies an unresolved architectural question about whether the abstractions developed for Docker and containerd remain suitable for WebAssembly runtimes.

In particular, the unresolved issue concerns the division of responsibilities for request handling and isolation: request processing might be delegated to processes inside a container, or request-based isolation might instead be implemented directly by the WebAssembly runtime. The paper avoids resolving this question by focusing on a standalone orchestrator, Kirin, that natively supports WebAssembly services.

References

However, these projects are still in the incubation stage. The goal of these projects is to integrate Wasm into existing ecosystems, but it remains unclear whether the same abstractions and separation of concerns that work well for Docker (containerd) also make sense for a Wasm runtime. For example, it is not obvious whether request handling should be delegated to processes running within a container, or whether request-based isolation should instead be provided directly by the runtime.

— Kirin: Cloud-native WebAssembly Service Orchestration  (2609.39631 - Bauer et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section 3, subsection “Requirements,” paragraph “Service discovery”

However, our evaluation was deliberately scoped to isolated workloads and a purpose-built orchestrator, which leaves open the question of how these results carry over to production environments. For future work, we aim to examine WebAssembly-based services in the context of large microservice topologies and in the context of mature and distributed orchestrators such as Kubernetes.

— Kirin: Cloud-native WebAssembly Service Orchestration  (2609.39631 - Bauer et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section 6, “Conclusion”